Given the plethora of content available to modem television viewers, parental control systems have become near ubiquitous in electronic program guides (EPGs), which allow users to filter content for viewing. For example, parental control systems give parents the ability to decide what their children can watch when they are not around. Typically, a parental control system will have an access code that can be input to block and unblock content. A child attempting to access a blocked program and unaware of the access code will not be able to view the program. However, with this binary approach (access / no access based on a single code), multiple users in a household may have access to a media asset and may perform actions (e.g., deleting the media asset) that the other users do not want performed as there is no way to differentiate the identity of the user performing the action.
Some conventional systems attempt to solve this problem by using a user-profile system where users enter different codes to identify which specific user he or she is. However, this approach, using user-specific codes, while stronger than a single code to block and unblock media assets, still has the same problem in terms of validating user identity. For example, if a parent gives a child his or her code in order for the child to access a blocked media asset once, the child could conceivably remember the code and perform any of the actions the parent could at any time, defeating the purpose of having user-specific codes.